Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom Reasons Why Your Emails Suck

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom Reasons Why Your Emails Suck About two years ago now (holy cow!), I wrote a post on why long emails are irritating. In summary, long emails are annoying because they take too long to read, don’t respect the recipient’s time by getting right to the point, and tend to ask too many questions. But there are other reasons most emails suck. I receive about 100 emails a day, most of which are unsolicited, and here are my biggest pet peeves. If you don’t want people to hit delete automatically every time they see your name in their inboxes, it’s time to stop doing these five things: Failing to Customize When someone has sent an email to me along with 50 (or 5000) other people, I know it. It usually doesn’t address me by my name, and even if it does, it never mentions anything specific to me. The content is generic and makes me feel decidedly unspecial. Almost 100 percent of the time, that’s an invitation to delete it. Copying Everyone and Their Grandmother Most people know better than to send individual emails with a huge number of addresses in the “to” box, but there are still those who are cc happy. Even if it’s part of your organizational culture to use the carbon copy function to cover your butt, do ask yourself whether everyone you’re including really needs to read this information. Like what youre reading? Finish the post at Intuits Fast Track blog.